Mar/Apr 2005

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Care for the bodies of our dead is an affirmation of our firm belief in the resurrection.
—Saint Augustine, "On Caring for the Dead"

It is Good Friday, two springs after my mother's death, the first spring after my father's. Today I'm less aware of the Savior's torturous dying than of the cold death, the artists' visions of Mary cradling a man's corpse, believing his final phrase: "It is finished." With another woman's Joseph, she wrapped her son in swaddling cloths and laid him in a stone tomb because there was no room among the living. On Sunday morning other Marys carrying aromatic spices would hope to delay the decay, but they knew there was no real disguise. Flesh to dust.

This awareness is heightened, having two weeks ago read the March "assignment" for my book group, a short story, "Roof Work" by Joe Ashby Porter. The low-action plot goes something like this: While repairing a roof, 20-year-old Patrick listens to an older neighbor's childhood perception of altar-call manipulation. The self-absorbed tale explains why she as an adult has no Christian faith. Her story goes on for 11 pages, and then there's an abrupt shift to "four days later," when Patrick dreams of glimpsing his father's "rotting face," coffined now for three years. The memory of the dream changes him and his grief. "I had taken the death as a fact about me," now orphaned, "and strangely not taken it as what it was above all, a fact about Poppa."1

I read this story with dispassion, focusing on the editorial puzzle I couldn't figure out; what hinge connected the story on the roof and the dream underground? The Sunday-afternoon group discussion revolved around this question and landed on the limits of a self-referential view of life and death, humanity ...